Everything related to software development.
This Git guide is for software developers who already know the most basic Git commands. After reading it, you can confidently clean the past commit history with an interactive rebase, revert commits, reset branches, merge branches, force push, or recover orphaned commits. This guide only contains the most necessary bits, to avoid mental overload. Introduction … Read more
I present my own hardware benchmark automation framework that creates a Kubernetes cluster with different VM types of your choice, schedules a containerized benchmark container on each node, and collects+processes the result. The framework is open source and available on GitHub. I also provide hints for how to visualize the results. Introduction A hardware benchmark … Read more
Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) is a benchmark orchestration tool which runs multiple configurable benchmark CLIs and extracts their results. This article explains the two most important core concepts of PTS, test profiles and test suites, and how to build them yourself. The detailed steps of installing and running tests are also explained, as well as … Read more
This article discusses virtual cloud hardware benchmarks, which help you choose the best performing virtual cloud-based CPU/disk/memory hardware for your needs. I go into the cost-benefit ratio of benchmarking, and provide many good practices for hardware benchmarking, such as ensuring proper reproducibility. Finally, I explore 6 off-the-shelf benchmark tools that measure CPU, memory or disk … Read more
This article uses my fully-automated benchmark suite which creates a temporary Azure Kubernetes cluster (AKS) with over 30 different Azure VM sizes, schedules a container-based benchmark on each VM (which measures CPU and disk performance), and collects + visualizes the results. I share the raw results and an Excel sheet with various meta-information and graphs, … Read more
Having multiple calendars that are not synchronized often causes scheduling issues. To solve this problem, I built a Microsoft Power Automate flow that synchronize Google calendar with Outlook. The flow is free / open-source, and here I explain how to set it up, configure and use it. Originally posted on 2024-01-14, updated on 2024-03-02 to … Read more
The year 2023 has come to an end, so I took some time to reflect on my activities. Website / Blogging – who is reading this anyway? In 2020, I relaunched my personal website, using WordPress with the GeneratePress theme, which has been a good choice so far. In general, WordPress is quite good, except … Read more
This article explores my Kubernetes operator that provisions Azure Pipelines agents as Kubernetes Pods. It comes with an in-depth tutorial for how to use my operator. I also explore all alternative options for running Azure Pipeline agents, and explain why using a Kubernetes-based option beats all other options. Introduction CI/CD pipelines are a cornerstone to … Read more
This article explains BuildKit caching in detail. First you learn background knowledge, e.g. how the local and remote cache differs, and what kinds of cache items BuildKit can store where. Then, BuildKit’s garbage collection is explained in detail. Finally, I present 5 tricks to speed up your image builds, e.g. tuning the garbage collection policies, … Read more
This article explains how Docker builds images with BuildKit, via buildx. It discusses the advantages of BuildKit over Docker’s legacy image builder, and then elaborates on three approaches for calling BuildKit in Docker: 1) using the embedded BuildKit library managed by the Docker daemon, 2) using a BuildKit container managed by buildx, and 3) using … Read more